[vox-tech] HD Repartition frustration

[Donald Greg McGahan]

Sorry,
I was not clear in my question.
I'm not concerned with the cylinders being greater than 1024 (unless I
should be).
The issue I have is that I cannot delete the existing partitions and,
therefore, cannot repartition the hard drive.
Donald McGahan

--- Peter Jay Salzman <p at dirac.org> wrote:

> On Thu 15 Jun 06,  6:37 AM, Donald Greg McGahan
> <dgmcgahan at sbcglobal.net> said:
> > I have a 100Gb Seagate 2.5 inch hard drive that currently has a
> ntfs
> > partition, and extended partition with a fat32 partition within it.
> I
> > wanted to repartition it to a single fat32 partition. I removed it
> from
> > it's (third party) external enclosure and installed it as an
> secondary
> > IDE slave (adapter) in my AMD K7 (1.33MHz) Ubuntu OS box.
> > I cannot seem to accomplish this task?!?
> > I've tired deleting all of the partitions and then writing but no
> joy.
> > I've been fussing with this on and off for a few days and thought I
> get
> > some help.
> > Here is what I'm doing.
> > I pop open a terminal window and 
> > 
> > fdisk /dev/hdd (i've tried both with sudo and sudo su)
> > 
> > then
> > 
> > Command (m for help): p
> > 
> > Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
> > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
> > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> > 
> >    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
> > /dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd
> (LBA)
> > /dev/hdd5           10028       12161    17141323+   b  W95 FAT32
> > 
> > Command (m for help): d
> > Partition number (1-5): 5
> > 
> > Command (m for help): p
> > 
> > Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
> > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
> > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> > 
> >    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
> > /dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd
> (LBA)
> > 
> > Command (m for help): w
> > The partition table has been altered!
> > 
> > Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
> > Syncing disks.
> > dig at vill:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/hdd
> > 
> > The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 12161.
> > There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> > and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> > 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
> > 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
> >    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
> > 
> > Command (m for help): p
> > 
> > Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
> > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
> > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> > 
> >    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
> > /dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd
> (LBA)
> > /dev/hdd5           10028       12161    17141323+   b  W95 FAT32
> 
> I was under the impression that BIOS automagically does translation
> to get
> around this.  It uses some geometry for disk I/O and, transparently,
> a fake
> geometry when talking to things like DOS.  There's a "large hard
> drive"
> HOWTO (or something like that) which gives gory details.
> 
> If your BIOS is newer than, say, mid-nineties, I don't think this is
> really
> an issue, and hasn't been for over a decade.
> 
> Pete
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